Posters in Bnei Brak blast Nesher cement company for alleged desecration of graves in Ramle.

A group of haredi extremists has plastered walls in Bnei Brak with posters
blaming the alleged desecration of graves in Ramle for the barrage of rockets
from Gaza.

The posters were issued in the name of the “gedolei yisrael,”
or senior haredi rabbinic leaders, but did not contain the signatures of any
rabbis. A previously unknown group calling itself the Committee for Activities
for the Rescue of the Graves of the Mishnaic and Talmudic sages of Nesher
produced the broadsheets.

One poster, titled “The robbery must stop,”
asserted that “because of the desecration of the graves of the Mishnaic and
Talmudic sages at the ‘Nesher’ building site and their removal from the earth,
houses in Israel are felled and turned to dust from missile
fire.”

Another poster, this one headed with the exclamation “Pursue and
destroy!” states that “at this time when millions of Jews are endangered due to
rocket fire in Israel... and many houses are destroyed and made into dust, we
must look inwards at ourselves.”

“Why has this disaster befallen us?” the
poster’s authors wrote, immediately before claiming that it is due to “the
destruction, in recent years, of Israel’s largest cemetery.”

Wall
posters, or pashkevilim as they are known in Yiddish, serve an important
function in an ultra-Orthodox society that has traditionally shunned television
and other forms of mass media. Such posters are used to invite community members
to events, announce deaths and other lifecycle events and publicize rabbinic
edicts.

Rabbi Shmuel Pappenheim, a haredi activist and the former
unofficial spokesman of the staunchly anti-Zionist Eda Haredit organization,
commented that such an extremist message must come from the fringes of the
haredi community and does not represent mainstream ultra-Orthodox
thinking.

While he said that the desecration of graves is a “most serious
matter” that concerns many haredim and is not to be taken lightly, it is
inappropriate to blame the country’s current security woes on the
issue.

Moreover, he stated, the rabbinic leaders of his community “are
not afraid to put their names on proclamations” and that “any poster on which
the author is afraid to put his name and on which no names of gedolim are
written” should not be taken seriously. Most haredim, he asserted, know not to
be taken in by such propaganda.

Avraham Zuroff, a former haredi
journalist, noted that while the names, and even the signatures, of haredi
leaders can be found on broadsheets, many times the poster’s message is a
distortion of the quoted rabbi’s words, if not an outright
fabrication.

“Many pashkevilim take the words of rabbis out of the
context in which they were uttered,” Zuroff told The Jerusalem
Post.

Haredim have a history of opposing construction projects over
concerns for the possible desecration of Jewish graves that dates back to the
1950s with the establishment of the Atra Kadisha (“holy place” in Aramaic)
organization.

The Atra Kadisha has previously used violence to prevent
projects to which they are opposed, such as the new, bombproof emergency room in
Ashkelon’s Barzilai Medical Center.

The current furor is over excavations
at a quarry near Ramle that have been conducted over the last several years by
archeologists from the University of Haifa. The Nesher cement company owns the
quarry and is sponsoring the dig.

According to the university, a “few
dozen burial caves have been revealed so far in what seems to be a Second Temple
Period graveyard” at the site.